I am a professor and endowed professor at the University of Houston where I founded and direct the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and head the graduate program in space architecture. My background deals extensively with research, planning and design of habitats, structures and other support systems for applications in space and extreme environments on Earth. I have recently written a new book titled "Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax". It can be previewed and ordered at www.climateofcorruption.com. Additional information about my book and views can be found on my YouTube address: http://www.youtube.com/climateofcorruption.

Pestered By Mosquitos And Tics Ticking You Off A Mite? Perhaps Thank The Green War On DDT

Slightly more than four decades ago, the U.S. banned the use of the pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichlororethane (thankfully, DDT, for short) which must certainly qualify as the most controversial synthetic chemical ever devised by humankind. There can be no doubt that DDT use has prevented deaths of many millions of the world’s most vulnerable residents from malaria and other insect-borne diseases. Nor can there be any real question that long-term bans on its use in the most desperate nations have resulted in deaths of far many more. Publicity campaigns against its use premised upon toxicity to wildlife and humans, whether true or not, have been enormously effective.

While many of the arguments against DDT are based upon dubious quasi-scientific claims, there are also studies that raise certain legitimate concerns warranting further investigation. Accordingly, a great need exists for truly objective research which avoids persistent political and ideological influences. In addition to comprehensive analyses of human and bio-system risks, benefits and necessary controls, consequences of delayed interventions must also be assessed. The more than 30,000 annual cases of avoidable Lyme disease in the U.S. are but one example.

To better appreciate the past and present-day significance of this remarkable chemical compound, let’s flash back to a time soon after its properties were first “put into action” nearly seven decades ago. Robert Zubrin discusses this history in his excellent new book, Merchants of Despair.

The Other Secret Weapon of WWII

During the last days of WWII, the Nazis systematically destroyed aqueducts, reservoirs and the sewer system in Naples. Left without sanitation the city of more than a million people was plagued with a lice-transmitted typhus epidemic which killed one out of four of the thousands who contracted it. Alarmed about the threat to our invading troops as well as the local population, General Eisenhower made a desperate plea to Washington for help. Fortunately, a secret weapon called DDT was ready just in time. By January 1, 1944, the first shipments of what would eventually amount to 60 tons arrived in Italy. People lined up as military police officers dusted them with the powder while other spray teams dusted public buildings and shelters. By month’s end a miracle occurred…the lice were virtually exterminated and the epidemic was over.

As Allied forces advanced north from Naples to Rome, the retreating Germans then demolished dikes which Mussolini had constructed before the war to drain mosquito-infested Pontine marsh which made the area an uninhabitable malaria hellhole. The tactic temporarily served as an effective defense. Malaria struck 22,000 Allied troops during the early summer of 1943, a greater casualty toll than was inflicted by Axis forces directly. But again, Americans turned their secret weapon DDT on the problem, deploying airborne crop dusters and infantry spray teams. Success was total. The Pontine mosquitos were wiped out, and GIs pushed on with negligible malaria losses to liberate Rome in the early morning of June 5. The Allied high command declared that from then forward, “DDT marches with the troops.”

As Winston Churchill stated on September 24, 1944: “We have discovered many preventives against tropical diseases, and often against the onslaughts of insects of all kinds, from lice to mosquitoes and back again. The excellent DDT powder which had been experimented with and found to yield astonishing results will henceforth be used on a great scale by the British forces in Burma and by the Americans and Australian forces in the Pacific and India in all theaters.”

And they did. Similar successes were achieved when British and American troops advanced in Europe and encountered, treated and saved lives of millions of victims of Nazi oppression who were dying from insect-borne diseases: civilians under occupation, slave laborers, prisoners of war, and concentration camp inmates. The DDT triumphs over diseases were realized in the Asia-Pacific theater: in the Philippines, Burma, China and elsewhere. Never before had a single chemical saved so many lives in so many places in such a short period.

In 1948, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to Paul Miller for discovering the chemical’s marvelous pesticide application. As the Nobel committee stated: “DDT has been used in large quantities in the evacuation of concentration camps, of prisoners and deportees. Without any doubt, the material has already preserved the life and health of hundreds of thousands.”

After WWII DDT became widely available to public health agencies around the world, very much including the U.S. Prior to the war between one and six million Americans, mostly drawn from rural regions of the South, contracted malaria annually. In 1946 the U.S. Public Health Service initiated programs to apply DDT to interior walls of homes, and by the first half of 1952, there were only two confirmed malaria cases in the entire nation!

Thanks to DDT, comparable results were being realized in other countries: Malaria virtually disappeared in Europe by the mid-1950s; rates rapidly dropped by 80 percent in South Africa; Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) saw a malaria incidence drop from 2.8 million in 1946 to 17 total cases in 1963; and similarly, India cut its malaria death rate to nearly zero.

In 1955, with U.S. financial backing the U.N. World Health Organization (WHO) launched a global DDT campaign to eradicate malaria across large areas of the developing world which cut rates in Latin America and Asia by 99 percent or better.

A New War: DDT Becomes the Enemy

Not everyone, however, was happy about all of these achievements. One such person was Club of Rome co-founder Alexander King. In 1990 he expressed why: “My own doubts came when DDT was introduced for civilian use. In Guyana, within two years it had almost eliminated malaria, but at the same time the birth rate doubled. So my chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it greatly added to the population problem.”

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